This is an inflatable campfire. Amazon has them for $12.99, and I like to think they come in a box marked DANGER: HIGHLY INFLATABLE, but they probably don’t. I first encountered them during a recent Parents As Reading Partners event at a nearby elementary school, which I participated in with three other local authors.

The event was held in the evening, the theme was Camping Out, and each author sat next to his or her own campfire in the school gym and read to the kids, who went from author to author dragging their pillows and sleeping bags behind them, so it actually may have been a ploy to mop the gym during an ongoing custodians strike.

Playing with fire.

I had never seen an inflatable campfire, and when I expressed trepidation to the event organizers, they assured me the school was equipped with inflatable smoke detectors. There was a billboard outside the school depicting Smokey the Bear holding a hatpin, next to the slogan ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT INFLATABLE FIRES. (Had I known in advance, I would have brought a bag of inflatable marshmallows. The Stay-Puft brand, as seen in Ghostbusters.)

For me, the most memorable moment of the evening occurred when I looked up from my book, from which I had just read a passage about three kids finding a crayon between some sofa cushions, to see a fifth-grade boy sitting a few feet from me, engrossed in a book three times the size of mine. I asked him what it was. He held it up so I could see. It was The Collected Works of H. P. Lovecraft. So I’m reading about crayons, and my audience is reading the Necronomicon. I told the kid Cthulhu would get him for this. (And, I swear, as I said the name Cthulhu, all the campfires in the room deflated a little. It was a creepy moment.)

The event was a great success. By the end of the evening the kids were pumped, and the campfires much less so. Mine had a distinct list to it, and so did I. I'm not as good at sitting cross-legged on the floor as I used to be.